Design and Implementation of a Rotary Parking System for a Truly Smart City in line with Smart Cities Technologies and Trends

As the human population continues to grow, the number of cars and other vehicles in cities continues to grow. This growth, however, is coupled with an increasing demand for land for buildings, industry, housing, and agriculture purposes. This leaves very little land for parking spaces and slots in the cities. Resulting in massive jams forming daily, drivers stuck in parking lots looking for a spot to park, be it offices, schools, and places of work. These jams result in wasted invaluable accumulated man-hours, time wasted that could, otherwise, be better utilized. Hence, there is a need for an automated parking system, one that is able to utilize the available limited space, reduce lost man-hours, and provide an environmentally friendly solution to the parking-lot jams. In this paper, we investigate the existing technologies for automated parking systems and develop a working prototype of a Rotary Parking System, in-line with the Smart-City needs. Drivers can either use buttons, their smart phones, or other identifying methods to park their cars. The paper presents the mechanical design steps, components used, and the programming of the developed system. Then, the developed system is evaluated. Results show successful implementation of the developed system; a working prototype as well as a simulated system was developed for this work and data show that, indeed, the developed Rotary parking system has the potential to reduce the number of lost man-hours wasted on parking cars and help reduce its related stress, further improving the quality of life there.